Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, November 1943

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The cover is by Maurice Bower, an artist I’m not familiar with who did quite a few covers for ADVENTURE during this period. It’s an okay cover, not one of my favorites by any means, but it promises excitement inside and that’s what it was supposed to do.

The first thing I noticed about this issue is that it has a story by Georges Surdez in it. Surdez is always good. But when I opened it up, the story by him is actually the first installment of a two-part serial set in World War II. Boo! I don’t own the issue with the second part, and it doesn’t appear to be online, so I wound up skipping this one. I also skipped the final installment of “The Fleet in the Forest”, a five-part historical serial about the War of 1812 by Carl D. Lane. It was published as a novel. Maybe I’ll read it one of these days, as I find the War of 1812 interesting.

The next thing I noticed is that there are three non-Western short stories by authors best remembered for their Westerns. “Collision Hazard” by L.L. Foreman is one of several stories in this issue set during World War II. It’s a tale of naval action centered around a tugboat, not the usual vessel you’d think of in a story like this. But it’s an excellent yarn, very tense and well-written. Foreman was one of the best Western pulpsters and he demonstrates his skill here, too. “Message to Manakas” is by Hal G. Evarts Jr. (son of the early Western novelist Hal G. Evarts Sr.) and is another World War II yarn about a soldier of Greek descent being infiltrated into Crete to deliver a message to the leader of the Greek underground. It’s well-written but maybe not quite as exciting as it should have been. “Break-Through” by Robert E. Mahaffey, one of the regulars in various Popular Publications Western pulps, is a short-short about a couple of GIs driving a truck in North Africa. It has a twist ending that I didn’t see coming, and that makes it effective.

“Gray Is For Apple” is another short story set during the war, a nice little yarn about an Australian soldier in the New Guinea campaign who’s a fantastic marksman despite a handicap he has to overcome. The author, Christian Folkard, was an Australian journalist and war correspondent who published only three stories in the pulps, in 1943 and ’44. This is the first of that trio, and it’s a good one.

The novelette “One Little Slip” is a Northern by H.S.M. Kemp, who wrote plenty of them for various pulps. It’s a cleverly plotted tale in which a Mountie solves a murder. I liked it quite a bit.

The other novelette in this issue is “Red Justice” by William Du Bois. It’s part of a series about an army officer named Captain John Carter (Really? That’s the name you want to use?) who battles the Seminole Indians during the 1830s. There’s a lot of back-story from the other entries in the series, I didn’t care for the protagonist, and the writing never resonated with me. I read it, but I didn’t care for it.

There’s also an article by Hugh B. Cave about PT boats that’s actually an excerpt from his non-fiction book on the subject LONG WERE THE NIGHTS. Cave’s work is always worth reading, and I’ve been interested in PT boats ever since being a fan of McHALE’S NAVY in its original run 60 years ago, so I read and enjoyed this article even though I usually skip the non-fiction content in fiction magazines.

So this issue of ADVENTURE is a really mixed bag. None of the stories are outstanding, but the ones by Foreman, Evarts, Mahaffey, Folkard, and Kemp are all okay, entertaining yarns without being all that special. Don’t rush to your shelves for this one, but if it’s handy you might find it worth reading.

One more note: in the back of this issue and others of the era is a column called “Lost Trails”, where readers can write in, in hopes of reconnecting with friends or relatives they’ve lost track of. Most of these notes are fairly bland, if vaguely poignant, but one in this issue caught my eye: “Louis Sixt, probably known as Bob Six, last heard of Gananoque, Ont., and Vancouver, B.C. Age about 26, height 4’ 10”, weight 135 lbs., gray eyes, back-brushed straight brown hair. Scrapper, gambler, seafaring man. Anyone having knowledge of his whereabouts please write his brother Paul Sixt c/o Adventure.” What a great description! And now I want to write a series of pulp yarns about a scrappy little guy named Bob Six knocking around and having adventures all over the world. I’ll probably never do it, of course, but it’s fun to think about. Just out of curiosity, I tried to look up Louis Sixt and his brother Paul, but I couldn’t find out anything about them. Maybe one of their descendants will read this and email me one of these days. Stranger things have happened, as the saying goes.

The Blazing Land - Hal G. Evarts

There were two Western writers named Hal G. Evarts, father and son. The father was a successful author during the first three decades of the 20^th Century. His son was even more prolific during the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies. THE BLAZING LAND is by Evarts Jr. and is the first thing I’ve read by either of them.

This novel, published as a paperback original by Dell in 1960 and reprinted in 1966 (the edition I read) is set in California and Arizona during the early days of the Civil War. It opens in the sleepy little town of Los Angeles, where rancher Will Colladay is looking for his ne’er-do-well brother Andy. Andy has really gotten himself in trouble this time. Thrown in jail by the army for expressing sentiments in support of the Confederacy, Andy has broken out and killed a soldier in the process. The woman he’s engaged to marry, a beautiful redheaded faro dealer, convinces Will to help his brother escape his pursuers. In order to do that, Will makes a deal with a shady character that puts his ranch at risk, but he succeeds in getting Andy away from Los Angeles and together with the redhead, who insists on coming along, they head for Mexico with the intention of eventually getting back to Texas and joining in the fight on the side of the South.

But to get there, they have to take a roundabout route through the Mojave Desert, which means they’ll have to survive the elements, hostile Indians, treacherous whites, and pursuit from the military, not to mention clashes with each other.

THE BLAZING LAND is a little slow to get started, but once it does, it becomes more hardboiled and suspenseful. Evarts does a great job with the setting and the characters are all well-developed and interesting, with some really despicable villains. (Some of you may have noticed that I like books with really despicable villains.) The outcome is maybe a little bit predictable and the book could have used a few more action scenes, but overall, I think it’s a really solid traditional Western. I definitely plan to read more by Evarts Jr. I have a few books by Evarts Sr., too, and I may even get around to them one of these days.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, September 1946

Under the editorship of Kenneth S. White, ADVENTURE was still a good pulp in the late Forties. In this issue, that starts with a cover by Peter Stevens that I really like, illustrating an oil field story by Thomson Burtis. Also on hand in this issue are William Campbell Gault, Jim Kjelgaard, Joe Archibald, Wilbur S. Peacock, Hal G. Evarts, and Bill Adams, among others. This issue is available on-line here, and I'm intrigued enough that I'll probably read the Burtis story, if nothing else, because of my fondness for oil field yarns. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, February 1947

If I had the actual pulp, I could probably tell for sure, but from the scan it looks like this may be an injury to a hat cover. Or maybe that's some sort of design on the guy's hat, I'm not sure. But either way I'm confident that "Blind Trails at Broken Butte" by W.C. Tuttle is a pretty good story because Tuttle was about as consistent a Western writer as you're ever going to find. I hate to say it because I don't care for the Swap and Whopper series by Syl McDowell, but "Billboard Buckaroos" isn't a bad title, either. Elsewhere in this issue of THRILLING WESTERN are stories by old pros Hal G. Evarts, Harold Cruikshank, and William O'Sullivan.